Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.
Although cinemas have only just started to reopen as mass vaccination takes the edge off the COVID pandemic, there has been no shortage of movies of all shapes and sizes to watch over the past months. From comic book blockbusters like The Suicide Squad or Black Widow, to more niche genre pieces like Censor or Pig, there has been a satisfying variety of offerings compared to more traditional cinematic summers, which tend to be dominated by major studio releases alone.
Rather than
review each individually, these round-ups comprise short reviews of several films released to UK viewers over
the past few months. The six are Black Widow, Another Round, Reminiscence, Censor, Jungle Cruise and Old. Part Two looks at The Suicide Squad, The Green Knight, Zola, Free Guy, Gunpowder Milkshake, Pig and Shang-Chi & The Legend Of The Ten Rings.
BLACK WIDOW: 2020 was a year off for Marvel, with their last release prior to Black Widow being Spider-Man: Far From Home in mid-2019. Given that Black Widow's eponymous character died in Avengers: Endgame, the two-year gap between that film's release and this one doesn't do it any favours in terms of feeling past its sell-by date. That much was out of Disney's hands, but what wasn't was the movie being one of the more extreme examples of an overreliance on a Marvel house style which had been going stale well before 2019. From characters constantly undercutting themselves and their situation with sarcastic quips, to a non-entity of a villain, the pandering to social media activist topics ("The one resource the world has too much of [is] little girls," Ray Winstone's evildoer inanely postulates), bland cinematography and weightless CGI climax, it's all much of a muchness: competent and rarely outright bad, but utterly soulless. Worse, it turns Scarlett Johansson into a supporting character in her own movie, spending her screentime on (slightly) more interesting characters in a superfluous family subplot. David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Florence Pugh and Johansson herself do what they can with the thin gruel served, but far from being a welcome return for Marvel's brand of comic book spectacle, Black Widow offers the perspective that one of the few benefits of COVID was giving everyone a year's break from it all. [ 5 ]
ANOTHER ROUND: Winner of the Best International Picture award at the Oscars in April, Thomas Vinterberg's drama about a group of men testing a theory about the benefits of maintaining a low level of drunkenness throughout the day is charming and anchored by a strong cast, particularly the always engaging Mads Mikkelsen, but a little too slight for its own good and never quite explores its premise on a deep enough level to be satisfying. Its dry tone and humour may not appeal to everyone, but is an agreeably delicate antidote to non-stop blockbuster spectacle. If only it had a little more to say, or its characters (outside Mikkelsen's Martin, who puts the actor's dance training to fun use) were a little less interchangeable. It falls somewhere between embracing the joie-de-vivre of heavy boozing and the dangers of becoming dependent on it, without ever going much deeper. It's a good film which feels like it could have been a lot more had it taken its characters' advice and loosened up a little. [ 6 ]
REMINISCENCE: This science-fiction drama from Westworld co-creator, Lisa Joy, presents a world drowning not just in water but exhausting clichés and half-baked characters and concepts. Viewers of Westworld may be familiar with that shortcoming, being a series which consistently confuses opacity and platitudes for intelligence. Hugh Jackman plays an operator of a machine which allows people to relive their fondest memories, who himself becomes addicted to trying to find out why a mysterious woman (Rebecca Ferguson) vanished from his life a few years earlier following a brief love affair. Although supposedly marketed at an adult audience, the condescending voice-over intrusively lays out its story beats, presumably as a means of relieving the legwork of underdeveloped characters who cannot support it. Attempts to force some kind of flavour through knockoff noir dialogue and tropes only add to the frustration of a movie at once endlessly pretentious and deeply stupid. [ 4 ]
CENSOR: A bold and ambitious directorial debut from Welsh filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond sets itself in the midst of the 'Video Nasty' panic of '80s Britain, where a number of trashy horror films were banned and scapegoated for a rise in violent crime. Niamh Algar plays a censor who believes she has discovered in one such movie a clue towards finding out what happened to her sister, who disappeared (possibly abducted) when they were children. The movie's ambiguous storytelling rewards rewatches, with clues quietly woven throughout and easy to miss first time around. Bailey-Bond neatly executes a number of technical tricks with aspect ratio and image quality, if perhaps getting a little too showy at times and over-relying on the garish neon lighting which has become a cliché of its own in recent years. Niamh Algar is tremendous, presenting a performance at once tightly controlled and yet turbulent under the surface. The only serious misstep is the pacing, which sees the movie abruptly change tone for the final act on the back of a twist both narratively and visually unconvincing. It's not quite up to the Kill List standard for modern British horror, but is idiosyncratic and thematically deep enough to be more than worth its 84-minute runtime. [ 7 ]
JUNGLE CRUISE: A filler blockbuster in every sense, Jungle Cruise shows how far engaging leads can take a movie despite having little to recommend elsewhere. Its theme park roots are shown in how liberally it replicates the Pirates Of The Caribbean formula of implausible physical stunts, an overdependence on CGI spectacle and a sense of humour neither as funny or as rebellious as its megacorporation overlord owners, Disney, thinks it is. Still, despite relying on exactly the same schtick he has been doing since ascending to movie superstardom, The Rock (yes, Dwayne Johnson, but let's be honest, he's still The Rock) carries his underwritten role with the effortless, likeable charisma honed in the wrestling ring. Accompanying him as the token love interest is Emily Blunt, a pairing which strikes a potent streak of comic chemistry even if the romantic side isn't there. Jack Whitehall gives a surprisingly competent turn as Blunt's comic relief brother, and Breaking Bad's Jesse Plemons plays his German villain to the comic book hilt, albeit tipping over into becoming annoying more than once. As a blockbuster, it's the same sort of stuff seen a thousand times before; as a story, it's overlong and with little of interest to say. Were it not for Blunt and The Rock, it would be a write-off: that it proves adequate is as high a compliment to their talent as can be given. [ 5 ]
OLD: M. Night Shyamalan has in recent years proven one of cinema's most reliable purveyors of the unintentionally funny and Old shows he still has plenty of accidental hilarity in his engine, even if he probably wishes he didn't. Though not quite up to The Happening levels of misguided entertainment - what is? - tone-deaf dialogue combined with baffling storytelling decisions, plus one extremely grumpy-looking child, add up to a fun and memorable experience, if rarely for the desired reasons. The movie sees a collection of stock characters trapped on a beach which ages them at a highly accelerated rate, and tracks their attempts to escape and the various terrible decisions made along the way. Not a single one behaves or talks like any human being in recorded history and the presence of a rapper named, no joke, Mid-Sized Sedan, emphasizes how Shyamalan seems to be operating at a slight but enjoyably daft skew from real life. As easy as it is to be sarcastic about the film and director's shortcomings, films and voices this strange undeniably add a distinct flavour to the cinematic landscape. While I can't recommend it in the normal sense, it's a hoot if you're on the right wavelength. [ 6 ]
